Jony Jimenez with Joel Figueroa

Jony Jimenez: I want to start before the album. Your parents divorced when you were four. It was you and your mom for a long time. Where was God in that?

Joel Figueroa: When we moved to Mexico, when I was around seven, my mom met God. From then on, she kept putting me in environments where God was present.

I began having experiences with God as a child. “Encounter” can be a loaded word, but there was a collision between my life and God that marked me. It followed me even when I turned away from Him.

As a teenager, I could be at a party smoking weed, surrounded by friends, and suddenly it would feel like time stopped. I knew God was there, and I knew I was ignoring Him. When God marks you, there is a thread that follows you through your life. You can run from it, but you cannot really get away from it. It haunts you.

JJ: When did you stop running?

JF: Around sixteen or seventeen, I went back to Mexico for a church conference. During worship, something very deep in me was being touched. I did not have language for it, but I experienced God and decided, “I want to serve You.”

After high school, I was working at Chili’s. One of the hostesses was a Christian, and she asked what I wanted to do. I told her I loved film and music and wished I could study them with God. She told me about Christ For the Nations Institute in Dallas.

JJ: So a hostess at Chili’s sent you to Bible school?

JF: Yes. I looked it up that night and thought, “This is not for me. I want to go to Australia.” Australia was too expensive, so I ended up in Texas. My mom drove me from the Valley to Dallas. It was the first time I had been away from her for that long. I cried through student orientation.

JJ: Texas instead of Australia.

JF: Exactly.

JJ: Were you already a singer?

JF: I had sung in choir as a kid and played violin for years. My orchestra teacher used to say, “If you can play it, you can sing it,” because you have to train your ear. I would sing along to Blink-182 in the shower and think, “Wait, when I sing with him, we sound the same. Can I sing?”

When I came back to God, I joined a small church in McAllen. They needed a bass player, so my mom bought me one from a pawn shop. One day the pastor asked me to sing “How Great Is Our God” while I played. When I started singing, it felt like a well inside me opened. It was something that had been there since I was born.

JJ: Then you auditioned for the praise band at Bible school and did not make it.

JF: At the time it felt world-shattering. I thought God would listen to me more, or that what I did would mean more, if I was on a stage.

Then I found the music rooms. A friend showed me Bethel’s Here Is Love, and I watched Jenn Johnson sing “I Love Your Presence.” She went off the page, beyond the structure of the song. I thought, “What is she doing? She is doing what my heart does.”

After class, I would go into a room with a piano, keep playing the same chord progression, and sing to God what was happening in my heart in real time. Songs started coming out. I fell in love with what people call the spontaneous song. Looking back, I think God was training me.

JJ: You eventually found a public version of that freedom at UPPERROOM.

JF: Before UPPERROOM, we would visit churches, and if I could predict everything that was going to happen, I would not want to go back. That was probably an immature way of saying, “I want to be somewhere God can interrupt.”

At UPPERROOM, Meredith put a microphone in front of me and said, “Sing. Do whatever you want.” We were trusted with an hour or two to sing to God. There were Sundays and Friday nights when you walked into the room believing anything could happen.

JJ: Then the private practice became globally visible. What did that do to you?

JF: My normal life changed very quickly. Our church became known globally. I went from not being known, and none of my songs being sung, to people singing them around the world. That is beautiful. It is a blessing. It also has weight.

In 2022, I went through a job transition. I also started dating Elyssa, who had been one of my best friends for ten years and is now my wife. I was making decisions that felt scary, but I knew that if I had children one day and they wanted to take a risk, I could not tell them to do it while knowing their dad never had.

Around that time, I felt God put His finger on songwriting and say, “If not now, then when?”

At first I tried to make the kinds of songs I was comfortable with, songs I thought my church might sing. They would not come out. What came out were hard questions about God, church, being a Christian in America, and being human. Writing gave language to frustrations and prayers I had carried for years.

JJ: Were you angry?

JF: I was angry. I was in tension. I wanted more of God, but I did not have language for that. I was asking, “Why do we move on in services when You are in the room? Why do we need people’s faces on things? My face is on things. How do I live with that when what I really want is You?”

The anger did not last because God was also the only person who could resolve where it came from. I would say, “I don’t understand this,” and it seemed like He wanted me to bring it to Him.

I do not ask questions just to challenge something. I ask because I want the truth. I have never been scared to ask God questions.

JJ: If being misunderstood is the fear, why release the questions?

JF: Because if I had not made Groanings, people would only have half of Joel.

I had been writing for almost a year when one of the producers, Eric Lopes Vilaverde, called and asked what I was doing with my music. I told him it was sitting in voice memos. He invited me to Kansas City to write with him and Jared Logan.

I had just returned from Europe, where I got engaged to Elyssa. A week later I was in the studio. The first song we wrote was “Genesis.” By the middle of that week, we knew there was a project in front of us.

I was afraid people would hear the rawness and give me that first shocked look, like, “What?” Eric and Jared kept telling me, “You need to be true to yourself, and God will meet you there.” We shaped the album together for two years. It would not exist without them.

JJ: “If I’m Ever on the Verge of Cynicism (Note to Self)” is not a subtle title.

JF: To pretend cynicism is not often knocking at the door, especially in 2025, would be dishonest.

When we wrote that song, ministries that had influenced us were falling. People we looked up to were falling. You sit in a studio saying, “Cool, we are writing music,” but writing can feel vapid while significant things are happening around you.

We realized that if we did not bring this to God, we would become jaded. The antidote to cynicism is truth, but not my truth. God’s truth cuts through it.

That is why the song says, “Jesus, You are my safety.” It can sound elementary, but there is no safety in anything else. No person, ministry, calling, bank account, or marriage can be my safety. If I make something else my safety, then when it falls, the lie that God is absent will feel confirmed because I put my hope in the wrong thing.

When your heroes fall, how do you process it? I do not fully know. I know that running to God helped us.

JJ: Does pain belong in congregational worship?

JF: Everyone can connect to pain, doubt, and hardship. The goal is not to stay there. The goal is to go to God.

Every song on this album is about God, to God, and through God. I understand the argument that only certain songs can be sung corporately, but I do not know if I agree. New expressions and new ways of relating to God are already happening.

Whether it is a large building or friends in a living room, I want people to take risks in what they say to God. A corporate song is not written merely to be corporate. It is written so an entire room can get to God.

JJ: Why “Needy”?

JF: The entire song is about being needy, but when I sit with it, it makes me want to worship. That is the point. Does the song turn you toward God?

When God authors faith in your heart, He persuades you. When I sing, it feels like He is persuading me to believe in Him again. You are moving God, but God is also moving you.

To make art that persuades people back to God, there is nothing like it. Something is invisible, then you create with God, and suddenly it exists. People can grab it and connect to Him.

JJ: Groanings does not sound like a conventional live worship record. Why did the album need a different language?

JF: I spent a lot of time studying good songwriters. I would watch songwriting videos while eating lunch, take notes, then go upstairs to the piano and practice what I had learned. I studied how hooks worked. I listened to singer-songwriters. I began discovering different ways to use my voice.

I can sing high and belt, but these songs felt like confession. Confession is intimate. I told the producers, “I do not want to belt on this album. I want the microphone to feel close.”

We used some layered belting, but I wanted most of the vocals in my lower register. I wanted heavy acoustics with electronic threads. I wanted a tight snare, almost like it came from Ableton, not a huge reverberant snare. We went through so many snares. Jared was very patient.

“Genesis” became our sonic reference. The vocal and drums had the thing we wanted, so we kept returning to it.

JJ: Where did the electronic pulse of “GROANINGS” come from?

JF: We watched Fred again..’s Tiny Desk performance in the studio. I had never seen it. The guys told me it would change my life, and I thought, “Whatever.” Then it completely inspired me.

When it ended, I asked if we could try writing something like that. Eric began playing piano, Jared made a beat, and I started writing the lyrics to “GROANINGS.” That combination of acoustic and electronic music was already something I loved. The record let me bring it into my own work.

JJ: You thought the album was done in 2024. The producers said it was not even close.

JF: I was devastated because I knew I would have to wait another year. They said, “There is spring. There is summer.” I found that offensive.

JJ: Offensive?

JF: Do you hear these songs? The trees are brown. It is raining. It is cold. This is a fall album.

JJ: The record moves from life toward death, then back again. How did that shape the sequence?

JF: When we assembled the track list, I noticed one group of songs was about new life, freedom, the gospel, and transformation. Then songs like “know me,” “GROANINGS,” “Needy,” “Ego Death,” and “vulnerability” turned toward dependence. They say, “I really need God, or I do not know what will happen.”

The record opens with “Iconoclasm” and ends with “U.” I wanted it to begin with God and end with God so it could be cyclical: life to death, death to life, then life to death again. That is the Christian human experience. Daily dying and daily living.

JJ: Do you want people outside the church to hear it?

JF: That is the dream. I am not only trying to lead Christian people to God. I am trying to lead people to God.

I would love to tour the album and create spaces where someone could hear the music and be persuaded by God back to God. I also want to write more congregational songs and bring what I discovered sonically on Groanings into those settings.

Sound can enter the heart before words do. Music is spiritual. What you play matters. Tone matters. How I sing a song matters, not only what I sing. The instruments are not filler.

JJ: Are you trying to break the worship format?

JF: Not anymore. When I was younger, I wanted to break boxes. Now I want to be faithful to what God gives me.

I still feel there is more to the music we can make in congregational settings. I do not fully have the language for it. Groanings was my way of taking risks musically and saying things to God that might not initially seem congregational, while trusting that people could connect to them.

I have learned to pay attention to tension because God speaks to me there. If I run from tension, I become complacent.

JJ: What does success look like in a room?

JF: There were nights when we would begin a song and something in the room would switch. You would think, “God is leading this entire room now.”

That is what I want. I do not know what genre it is. It is playing something God likes so much, and singing something God likes so much, that He begins leading.

The term “worship leader” is useful, but I do not really like it. I am trying to get people to stop looking at me and look at God. I am trying to go there with them.

JJ: Does God always lead?

JF: No. I get in the way.

The goal is to get out of the way. Let God be God. Let the music be excellent and the environment inspiring, but keep the main thing the main thing.

Groanings is the beginning of that for me. I do not know what it will become. It was something I had to make. Now God can grow it however He wants.